Pictured is

Bertram Generlette,
formerly principal at
Piney Branch Elementary in
Takoma Park, Maryland, and now
principal at Montgomery Knolls Elementary
School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

62 ED U C A T I O N N E XT / W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 educationnext.org
 research
School Leaders Matter
It is widely believed that a good principal
is the key to a successful school. No Child Left Behind
encouraged the replacement of the principal in persistently
low-performing schools, and the Obama administration
has made this a requirement for schools undergoing fed-
erally funded turnarounds. Foundations have invested
millions over the past decade in New Leaders for New
Schools, an organization that recruits nontraditional prin-
cipal candidates and prepares them for the challenges of
school leadership. And the recently launched George W.
Bush Institute is making the principalship a focus of its
activities. Yet until very recently there was little rigorous
research demonstrating the importance of principal quality
for student outcomes, much less the spe-
cific practices that cause some principals to
be more successful than others. As is often Measuring
the case in education policy discussions, we
have relied on anecdotes instead.
This study provides new evidence on the
the importance of school leadership by
estimating individual principals’ contribu-
tions to growth in student achievement. impact
Our approach is quite similar to studies that
measure teachers’ “value added” to student
achievement, except that the calculation is of effective
applied to the entire school. Specifically, we
measure how average gains in achievement,
adjusted for individual student and school principals
characteristics, differ across principals—both
in different schools and in the same school at
by GREGORY F. BRANCH, ERIC A. HANUSHEK, and STEVEN G. RIVKIN
educationnext.org W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 / E DU CA TION NEX T 63
different points in time. From this, we are able to determine
how much effectiveness varies from one principal to the next.
Our results indicate that highly effective principals raise the
achievement of a typical student in their schools by between
two and seven months of learning in a single school year;
ineffective principals lower achievement by the same amount.
These impacts are somewhat smaller than those associated
with having a highly effective teacher. But teachers have a
direct impact on only those students in their classroom; differ-
ences in principal quality affect all students in a given school.
We also investigate one widely discussed mechanism
through which principals affect student achievement: the
management of teacher transitions. Importantly, because
high teacher turnover can be associated with
both improvement and decline in the quality
of instruction, the amount of turnover on its
own provides little insight into the wisdom of
a principal’s personnel decisions. We confirm,
however, that teachers who leave schools with
the most-successful principals are much more
likely to have been among the less-effective
teachers in their school than teachers leaving
schools run by less-successful principals.
The final component of our analysis con-
siders the dynamics of the principal labor
market, comparing the effectiveness of prin-
cipals who move on to those who stay in their
initial schools. Constrained by salary inertia
and the historical absence of good perfor-
mance measures, the principal labor market
 Teachers affect only their students, while principals affect

all students in a school. The overall impact from increasing

principal quality exceeds the benefit from a comparable

increase in the quality of a single teacher.

does not appear to weed out those principals who are least
successful in raising student achievement. This is especially
true in schools serving disadvantaged students. This is trou-
bling, as the demands of leading such schools, including the
need to attract and retain high-quality teachers despite less
desirable working conditions, may amplify the importance
of having an effective leader.
The Texas Database
Our analysis relies on administrative data constructed
as part of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Texas
Schools Project. Working with the Texas Education Agency
(TEA), this project has combined different data sources to
create matched data sets of students, teachers, and principals
over many school years. The data include all Texas public-
school teachers, administrators, staff, and students in each
year, permitting accurate descriptions of the schools led by
each principal.
The Public Education Information Management System
(PEIMS), TEA’s statewide database, reports key demographic
data, including race, ethnicity, and gender for students and
school personnel, as well as student eligibility for subsidized
lunch (a standard indicator of poverty). PEIMS also contains
detailed annual information on teacher and administrator
experience, salary, education, class size, grade, population
served, and subject. Importantly, this database can be merged
with information on student achievement by school, grade,
and year. Beginning in 1993, Texas schools have administered
the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) each spring
to eligible students in grades 3 through 8. Our analysis there-
fore focuses on principals in elementary and middle schools,
for whom it is possible to develop performance measures.
The personnel data combine time as a teacher and as
an administrator into total experience, so it is not possible
to measure tenure as a principal accurately for those who
became a principal prior to the initial year of our data (the
1990–91 school year). We therefore concentrate on the years
from 1995 to 2001. Over this period, we are able to observe
7,420 individual principals and make use of 28,147 annual
principal observations.
Measuring Principal Quality
The fundamental challenge to measuring the impact of school
leaders is separating their contributions from the many other
factors that drive student achievement. For example, a school
that serves largely affluent families may create the illusion that
it has a great principal, when family backgrounds are the key
cause of high achievement. Alternatively, a school that serves
disadvantaged students may appear to be doing poorly but in
fact have a great principal who is producing better outcomes
than any other principal would.
Our basic value-added model measures the effectiveness of
a principal by examining the extent to which math achieve-
ment in a school is higher or lower than would be expected
based on the characteristics of students in that school, includ-
ing their achievement in the prior year. Put another way, it
examines whether some schools have higher achievement
than other schools that serve similar students and attributes
that achievement difference to the principal. This approach is
very similar to that employed in studies that measure teacher
quality using databases tracking the performance of indi-
vidual students over time.
The main concern with this approach is that there may
be unmeasured factors that affect school performance. Our
data contain only basic information on student background
characteristics, such as gender, race or ethnicity, and eligi-
bility for subsidized lunch. As a result, we cannot control
for more nuanced measures of students and their families,
such as motivation or wealth. We are, however, able to con-
trol for students’ test scores from the previous year, which
may well capture a lot of the characteristics that we cannot
measure directly. Moreover, there are also school factors not
under the direct control of the school, including the quality
of teachers inherited by the principal. Below we describe
alternative approaches to isolating the contributions of the
current principal.
In estimating principal effectiveness, we want to mini-
mize the influence of specific circumstances and look at the
underlying stable differences in impacts. This issue is impor-
tant because a principal’s impact may vary with tenure in a
school. A principal’s impact on the quality of the teaching
staff (whether negative or positive), for example, probably

64 ED U C A T I O N N E XT / W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 educationnext.org
 research
PRINCIPALS BRANCH, HANUSHEK, & RIVKIN

increases over time as the share of teachers who were hired
on her watch rises. To account for any differences in effective-
ness that are related to tenure as a principal in a given school,
we begin our analysis by focusing on data from the first three
years a principal leads a school.
This first analysis indicates that the standard deviation
of principal effectiveness is 0.21 standard deviations of test
scores (see Table 1). This is a very large figure, perhaps unbe-
lievably large, implying that a principal at the 75th percentile
of this effectiveness measure shows average achievement
gains of 0.11 standard deviations (relative to the average
principal), while one at the 25th percentile shows average
losses of 0.15 standard deviations. These differences are even
more pronounced in high-poverty schools, for which the
gap between the 25th and 75th percentile principal is more
than one-third of a standard deviation. On average across all
schools, the impact of having a principal 1 standard devia-
tion more effective than the average principal is as much as
seven additional months of learning in a single academic year.
As noted above, this initial estimate of the variability in
principal effectiveness may partly reflect differences in school
characteristics that are not under the principal’s control, such
as the quality of the school building, or decisions made by
district administrators as well as unmeasured parental influ-
ences. As a result, it may overestimate the amount of influence
principals actually have.
We begin to address this issue by measuring principal
effectiveness based only on comparisons of within-school dif-
ferences in student achievement growth over time. In simplest
terms, we compare average student achievement gains in the
same school under different principals. This method elimi-
nates the influence of any student, school, or neighborhood
characteristics that do not change over time. Its main draw-
back is that it ignores all differences in principal effectiveness
between schools, potentially underestimating the amount of
variation in principal quality. For example, if each school
tends to attract principals who are similar in quality whenever
it searches for a new principal, this approach will understate
the true extent of variation in principal effectiveness.
We conduct this second analysis using all of the prin-
cipals in our data, not just those in their first three years
leading a school, because the numbers of schools with

Methods and Results (Table 1)

All three methods find that school principals have a substantial impact on student achievement.

Method used to Sample used to Standard Annual impact of having

estimate the impact estimate the impact deviation of an effective rather than
of school principals of school principals principal effects an ineffective principal

1. Average math achievement Texas principals in their

gains adjusted for student + 16 percentile points
first three years of leading 0.21
background characteristics of student achievement
and school mobility rates the school

2. Difference in average
adjusted math achievement + 8 percentile points
gains between students All Texas principals 0.11
of student achievement
attending the same school
under different leaders

3. Additional year-to-year
fluctuation in average + 4 percentile points
adjusted achievement gains All Texas principals 0.05
surrounding a leadership of student achievement
transition

Note: The standard deviation of principal effectiveness is reported in standard deviations of student achievement. An effective principal is one at the
84th percentile of the quality distribution; an ineffective principal is one at the 16th percentile. The impact of an effective principal is reported for the
median student.
SOURCE: Authors’ calculations based on Texas Education Agency data

educationnext.org W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 / E DU CA TION NEX T 65

two principals observed in their first three years is quite
small. (Note that re-doing the prior analysis using data
on all principals does not significantly alter the results
presented above.) Restricting the analysis to comparisons
within schools, however, cuts our estimate of the variation
in principal effectiveness in half. Even this reduced estimate
is substantial, however, indicating that a 1-standard-devia-
tion increase in principal effectiveness raises school average
achievement by slightly more than 0.10 standard devia-
tions. This impact is roughly comparable to that observed
for variations in teacher effectiveness in studies that use
the same kinds of within-school comparisons.
Our first two methods involved estimating effectiveness
measures for individual principals and then calculating
the standard deviation of those measures. Although any
unmeasured school factors that are unrelated to principal
quality would not bias these results, such factors would
inflate our estimates of the variation in principal quality
based on these approaches. We therefore employ a third
approach that gauges the amount of variation in principal
effectiveness directly by measuring the additional fluc-
tuation in school average achievement gains when a new
principal assumes leadership, as compared to typical fluc-
tuations from year to year.
Focusing on the additional variation in school average
achievement gains around principal transitions reduces the
magnitude of the estimates. Nonetheless, the results remain
educationally significant: a 1-standard-deviation increase
in principal quality translates into roughly 0.05 standard
deviations in average student achievement gains, or nearly
quality between schools and again ignores any tendency
for a given school to attract principals of similar quality
over time, suggesting that it likely understates principals’
actual impact.
Teacher Turnover
The results presented so far rely on indirect measures of
principal impact, namely, student learning gains during a
principal’s tenure in a school. The data do not include any
observations about what a principal actually does, or fails to
do, to improve learning. We now turn to an analysis of the
interactions of principals with teaching staff, which bears
directly on a number of current policy debates.
A primary channel through which principals can be
expected to improve the quality of education is by raising
the quality of teachers, either by improving the instruction
provided by existing teachers or through teacher transitions
that improve the caliber of the school’s workforce. Teacher
turnover per se has received considerable policy attention,
largely because of the well-documented difficulties that new
teachers experience. The potential benefits of reducing turn-
over nonetheless hinge on the effectiveness of both entering
and exiting teachers.
We expect highly rated principals to be more successful
both at retaining effective teachers and at moving out less-
effective ones. Less highly rated principals may be less suc-
cessful in raising the quality of their teaching staffs, either
because they are less skilled in evaluating teacher quality,
place less emphasis on teacher effectiveness in personnel

Management of teacher quality is an important pathway

through which principals affect school quality. The fact that

less-effective teachers are more likely to leave schools run by highly

effective principals validates our measure of principal quality.

two months of additional learning. By comparison, previ-
ous research suggests that a 1-standard-deviation increase
in teacher quality raises achievement by somewhat more
than 0.10 standard deviations. Teachers affect only their
students, however, while principals affect all students in
a school. The overall impact from increasing principal
quality therefore substantially exceeds the benefit from
a comparable increase in the quality of a single teacher.
Importantly, this estimate ignores all variation in principal
decisions, or are less successful in creating an environment
that attracts and retains better teachers. Although better
principals may also attract and hire more-effective teachers,
the absence of reliable quality measures for new teachers and
the fact that many principals have little control over new
hires lead us to focus specifically on turnover.
Unfortunately, our data do not contain direct informa-
tion on personnel decisions that would enable us to separate
voluntary and involuntary transitions, and existing evidence

66 ED U C A T I O N N E XT / W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 educationnext.org
 research
PRINCIPALS BRANCH, HANUSHEK, & RIVKIN

The role of principals in fostering student learning is an important facet of education policy discussions. Strong leadership is viewed as
especially important for revitalization of failing schools.

suggests that teachers rather than principals initiate the
majority of transitions. In addition, the Texas data do not
match students to individual teachers, meaning that we must
draw inferences about teacher effectiveness from average
information across an entire grade.
With detailed information on teacher effectiveness and
transitions, we could investigate whether better principals
are more likely to dismiss the least-effective teachers and
reduce the likelihood that the more-effective teachers depart
voluntarily. In the absence of such information, however, we
focus on the relationship within schools between the share of
teachers that exits each grade and the average value-added
to student achievement in the grade. We examine how this
varies with our measures of principal quality based on stu-
dent achievement gains. For example, in a school where
5th-grade students learn more than 4th-grade students, we
would expect a good principal to make more changes to the
4th-grade teaching staff.
The results of this analysis confirm that the relationship
between higher teacher turnover and lower average value-
added in a given grade is stronger as principal quality rises.
This pattern of results is consistent with the theory that man-
agement of teacher quality is an important pathway through
which principals affect school quality. The fact that less-effec-
tive teachers are more likely to leave schools run by highly
effective principals also validates our measure of principal
quality. If our measure was just capturing random noise in
the data rather than information about true principal qual-
ity, we would not expect it to be related to teacher quality
and turnover.
Principal Transitions and Quality
Along with teacher turnover, instability of leadership is
often cited as an impediment to improving high-poverty
and low-performing schools. Consistent with these con-
cerns, we find that Texas schools with a high proportion
of low-income students are more likely to have first-year
principals and less likely to have principals who have been
at the school at least six years than those serving a less-dis-
advantaged population. Sorting schools by initial achieve-
ment rather than poverty level produces even larger differ-
ences (see Figure 1). The proportion of principals in their
first year leading a school is roughly 40 percent higher in
schools in the bottom quartile of average prior achieve-
ment than in schools in the top quartile; the proportion of

educationnext.org W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 / E DU CA TION NEX T 67


principals that have been at their current school at least six
years is roughly 50 percent higher in schools with higher-
achieving students.
Yet the import of leadership turnover also depends on
whether high- or low-quality personnel are leaving, some-
thing prior research has been unable to address. We there-
fore examine whether the likelihood that a principal leaves
following the third year in a school varies with her effective-
ness and with the share of low-income students in the school.
We observe principals making a variety of career decisions:
remaining in the same school as principal, becoming a prin-
cipal at another school in the same district, becoming a prin-
cipal in another district, moving into a central office position,
or exiting the public schools entirely. We divide principals
into four equal-sized groups based on estimates of their effec-
tiveness using the first of the three methods described above.
We also limit the data to include only principals with fewer
than 25 years of total experience in order to minimize com-
plications introduced by the decision to retire.
Our results confirm that the least-effective principals
are least likely to remain in their current position and most
likely to leave the public schools entirely. With the exception
of the schools with the lowest poverty level, however, there
is not a consistent relationship between the likelihood of
remaining on as principal and principal quality (see Figure
2). In high-poverty schools, for example, principals in the
middle two quartiles of effectiveness are substantially more
likely to remain than those in the bottom quarter. The most
effective principals are more likely to remain in the same
position than those in the bottom quartile, but are consider-
ably more likely to move on than those in the middle of the
quality distribution.
Another result emerging from this analysis that is trou-
bling from a policy perspective is the frequency with which
A principal in the top 16 percent of the quality distribution will produce annual cessful superintendents, a possibility that warrants
student gains that are 0.05 percent higher.
68 ED U C A T I O N N E XT / W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 educationnext.org
Principal Tenure (Figure 1)
Schools with high achievement were less likely to have
a new principal and more likely to have had the same
leader for several years.
45
40 39
35
30
26
Percent
25 23
20
16
15
10
5
0
Principal new Principal with
to school 6+ years in school
Schools with low achievement
Schools with high achievement
Note: Schools with low achievement are those in the bottom quartile
of Texas schools in terms of the prior math test scores of their stu-
dents; schools with high achievement are those in the top quartile.
SOURCE: Authors’ calculations based on Texas Education Agency data
low-performing principals move to principal positions at
other schools. This trend is particularly striking in high-pov-
erty schools, where more than 12 percent of poor performers
annually make such a move. In contrast, less than 7 percent
of the poorest performers in more-affluent schools become
principals at other schools. This may reflect the
fact that it is challenging in high-poverty schools
to separate the effects of school circumstances
from the quality of the principal, leading district
administrators to give principals from high-pov-
erty schools a chance at a different school.
The simple conclusion, nonetheless, is that the
operation of the principal labor market does not
appear to screen out the least-effective principals.
Instead, they frequently move to different schools,
perhaps reflecting the bargain necessary to move
out an ineffective leader in a public-sector orga-
nization. Potentially, this is where the superinten-
dent enters the picture. Making good decisions on
the retention and assignment of principals may be
among the distinguishing characteristics of suc-
additional study.
 research
PRINCIPALS BRANCH, HANUSHEK, & RIVKIN

Patterns of principal transitions indicate

that it is the least and the most effective who tend

to leave schools, suggesting some combination

of push and pull factors.

Conclusions 0.05 standard deviations higher than an average principal

The role of principals in fostering student learning is an for all students in their school.
important facet of education policy discussions. Strong lead- There are many channels through which principals influ-
ership is viewed as especially important for revitalization of ence school quality, although the precise mechanisms likely
failing schools. To date, however, this discussion has been vary across districts with the regulatory and institutional
largely uninformed by systematic analysis of principals’ structures that define principal authority. Because all prin-
impact on student outcomes. cipals participate in personnel decisions, we have focused on
Determining the impact of principals on learning is the composition of teacher turnover. For the best principals,
a particularly difficult analytical problem. Nevertheless, the rate of teacher turnover is highest in grades in which
even the most conservative of our three methodologi- teachers are least effective, supporting the belief that improve-
cal approaches suggests substantial variation in principal ment in teacher effectiveness provides an important channel
effectiveness: a principal in the top 16 percent of the qual- through which principals can raise the quality of education.
ity distribution will produce annual student gains that are Finally, patterns of principal transitions indicate that
it is the least and most effective
who tend to leave schools, sug-
Principal Turnover (Figure 2) gesting some combination of
In high-poverty schools, the best and worst principals are more likely to move on push and pull factors. This pat-
after three years than those in the middle quartiles. In low-poverty schools, the like- tern is particularly pronounced
lihood of staying on increases with principal quality. in high-poverty schools. It is
also worrisome that a sub-
Share of principals staying in the same school after their third year, stantial share of the ineffec-
by principal quality quartile tive principals in high-poverty
schools takes principal positions
80 76
73 72 74 in other schools and districts.
67 68
70
63 Clearly, much more needs to
60
59 be learned about the dynamics
of the principal labor market.
50 For student outcomes, greater
Percent

40 emphasis on the selection and

retention of high-quality princi-
30
pals would appear to have a very
20 high payoff.
10
Gregory F. Branch is program
0 manager at the University
High-poverty schools Low-poverty schools of Texas at Dallas Educa-
tion Research Center. Eric A.
1st (Worst) 2nd 3rd 4th (Best)
Hanushek is senior fellow at the
Note: High-poverty schools are those in the top quartile of Texas schools in terms of the percent of stu-
Hoover Institution of Stanford
dents eligible for a subsidized lunch; low-poverty schools are those in the bottom quartile. University. Steven G. Rivkin is
SOURCE: Authors’ calculations based on Texas Education Agency data professor of economics at Univer-
sity of Illinois at Chicago.

educationnext.org W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 / E DU CA TION NEX T 69